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Twilight Carmansville, New York, summer 1850
Eleven AM. The family rises severally from its fifth meal of the day. John James taking his fare now as the birds do—ten, eleven, twelve meals—with busy, flustering calls and gestures, the other Audubons always in bemused and reluctant attendance.
Just before twelve and the day’s sixth meal, Lucy appears at the study door, in old, crushed green taffeta, as rumpled and as fragile as the lichen in her husband’s famous painting of the Ivory Bills, her eyes weary ciphers behind the spectacles’ glare. With her, a well-dressed traveler in tailcoat and white waistcoat, yellow stirrup pants looping the soles of riding boots, A very goldfinch of a man, John James would have said in another life. The stranger bears his favorite plate from the Royal Octavo, 1843, the Long-billed Curlews: a soft geometry of curve on curve on curve, the male’s bill curving to his crustacean dinner in the sand, the female’s curved above his sloping back, sinuous neck craned rearward, fixing us with a quizzical and guarded stare. A November sky torn gently here and there to let the blue light in. Across the harbor, tiny Charleston, steeple-peaked, and farther still, the thin pink benison of sunset, Man and his systems a distant pair of irrelevances in this bird’s-eye view. A kind enthusiast, the stranger compliments the master, his mouth ajar in half-smiling anticipation. John James stares blankly back. After minutes, the lips move, and move again. Then the words come, a hard birth: Ah, yes. Beautiful. Two daughters. Both gone now. Too sweet for this old world, we like to say. Too sweet. And nothing more. Noon passes, the family relieved to postpone that looked-for sixth meal of the day. John Woodhouse's two young daughters hurry with their books and snacks wrapped in kerchiefs down to the sun-sheathed Hudson, rushing for its appointment with the Atlantic twenty miles away. But John James is lost now somewhere along the snaky Ohio, in the twilit purlieus of the Ivory Bill, the Passenger Pigeon: the soon-extinct.
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